Thursday, October 20, 2005

This is the question in my mind now. I just finished reading an article in the online newspaper which reads Delhi is sitting on a potential killer temblor and a major earthquake of about 6.5 on the Richter scale could occur in Delhi. I am just wondering what has suddenly changed or happened? And to my memory 2005 seems to be the year which has seen most number of natural disasters.

First we had the Tsunami even before we could actually step into 2005. The opening of the year itself was on a bad note. The earthquake which originated in the Indian Ocean triggered the Tsunami which devastated the shores of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, South India, Thailand and other countries with waves up to 100 ft. It caused serious damage and deaths as far as the east coast of Africa, with the furthest recorded death due to the tsunami occurring at Port Elizabeth in South Africa, 8,000 km away from the epicenter. Indonesia suffered another disaster with the earth quake that occurred in that region in March.

Next was the turn of rains. Mumbai had received 94.4cms of rain on a single day which is really too much to imagine. I was there in Mumbai on one of those rainy days. To compound the problem, the plane I was in skidded off the runway. Fortunately nothing happened to anybody on the plane. The rains were so heavy that it actually took more than an hour to get into the Mumbai airport from the stranded plane as visibility was extremely low. Hardly anything beyond 10 feet was visible.

Then in the US, there was this hurricane Katrina affecting all places in its path with New Orleans and Louisiana bearing the brunt. Even as the scattered life was trying to limp back to normal, hurricane Rita made landfall.

And now, earthquakes in Jammu and Kashmir and other northern parts of India and some places in Pakistan. The people of Jammu and Kashmir were already suffering due to the militancy there and this earthquake is just adding to their bundle of woes. And with winter close on their heels the situation looks really grim.

And down there in the southern parts of India, it’s mid of October and still no signs of rains leaving place for the fall. There was another article in the newspaper which read that for Bangalore, October 2005 already has the distinction of getting the highest monthly rainfall in 49 years. We still have 13 days to go before October draws to an end. People living in the low lying areas would have been the ones severely affected due to these rains.

There seems to be something wrong somewhere. Things seem to be going really haywire this year. It might just be a coincidence that all these major disasters are happening this same year or the Gods are really really angry.